New Year's Eve Bouillabaisse

What do boring people do New Year's Eve?

They cook! Here's a shot of our New Year's Eve bouillabaisse. I believe that it is traditional in some cultures to serve fish on New Year's Eve. This stew featured mussels, tilapia, clams, scallops, and shrimp, but the key ingredient was the 3/4 teaspoon of smoked paprika. Yum.

We served it with griddled sourdough bread and some fancy Spanish olive oil. We also had some aioli to drop right into your soup, nice and garlicky. The whole thing was very Spanish.

Any food or cooking New Year's resolutions out there?

Happy New Year everybody!

East African pomegranate citrus juice

How's that sound? Good, yes, and we had two pomegranates from the gigantic fruit basket that Ray and Edith gave us, and some spare oranges and tangerines, and we were thirsty, so for breakfast on the day after Christmas, I made some juice. Kevin helped. We used a recipe from A Vegan Taste of East Africa by Linda Majzlik.

Step one, cut two pomegranates and spoon out the seeds.


Two, boil with two cups water and a tablespoon of brown sugar, five minutes.


Three, put cooked seeds in fridge while squeezing a couple cups of fresh juice, using high-leverage press made in Aguascalientes, Mexico.


Four, when the seeds are cool, squeeze out as much juice as possible.

Five, mix and serve. Very refreshing!

Just a Tuesday evening with Tricia

Hello Barrys (and fans of the blog),

Whenever I am home for breaks I enjoy catching up with my good friend Tricia. This break, all she has been talking about is The Barry Table (she is it's number one fan) and how she longs for the good food while at school.
We were chatting away about life and food when we realized that it was approaching 9pm and neither of us had eaten dinner! I know that my mother would be horrified if I skipped a precious meal, so quickly we began going through her fridge.
"How about sandwiches?" I asked (of course).
"Great!"
So we pulled out the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions, several fancy mustards, two kinds of hummus, mushrooms, carrots (?), and a variety of nice cheese. I have to admit, I was getting pretty excited seeing all of these great ingredients come out.
"Uh, we might be low on bread..." Tricia said sadly holding up one end piece in a bread bag. "But I have been wanting make some!"
"Okay!"
So we put the sandwiches on hold and pulled out the computer, to look up a bread recipes, and Tricia's bread maker to (duh) make bread. While piling in the ingredients we realized that making bread in a bread maker takes 3+ hours, so we wouldn't have our dear sandwiches until about 12:45am.
This was no good.
Back to the fridge, and ah, glory, english muffins!
We ended up eating fried egg (with mushrooms) sandwiches on toasted english muffins. The sandwiches had orange pepper, tomato, red onion, lettuce, and garlic chili pepper cheddar cheese (slightly melted, to add a gooey warm goodness that complimented the fried egg nicely).
Mustard was tough decision because Tricia had a wide spectrum of mustard types, from sweet to spicy. Organic whole grain from france went on Tricia's sandwich and organic dijon from Whole Foods for me (both of which Tricia kindly pointed out earned the USDA organic seal of approval).
While I was perfecting the art of the fried egg Tricia took the anitiative to make ours a well rounded meal and busted out her organic roasted red pepper and tomato soup. She chose to heat it up in the microwave, adding salt, pepper, and parsely at precisily the right moment in the heating process. Her specialty.

We chowed down on our fantastic meal while listening to the bread machine continue to knead our precious whole wheat bread, now not needed for sandwiches.

After a few more hours of chatting we enjoyed a nice snack of warm whole wheat bread with seedless red raspberry butter (not organic!) and tazo red apple tea at 12:45am.

Winter Homecoming and Birthday

Not only was it the last day of fall, December 20, 2008, it was also Pat's 52nd birthday, Erin's 19th (a couple of days late), and Mom's/Granny's homecoming celebration -- she just got back home on Tuesday after a couple of months in hospitals and nursing homes.

We had almost everyone there -- Mom/Granny, John, Anne, Dave, Pat, Pam, Kevin, Carolyn, Brian, Sheila, Erin, Adam, Grace, Mike, and Lori. (Plus Rose, Mom's caregiver, who got a break in her room during our festivities.) We were missing Sean and Nanette, who are in California, and Janet and Freddy, who are in Florida.

You can see all the photos here, or in the slide show below.

It's good to be home

Hi Barrys,

Freddy and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the "dancing fools" slide show. It looks like everyone had a great time at the wedding, and Freddy and I thought that the night could not have gone more perfectly.

We had a relaxing yet activity-filled honeymoon. Our first port of call was San Juan, Puerto Rico. We wandered around the city in search for the perfect authentic Puerto Rican food, and found it at a small family run restaurant, with a modest size home-like kitchen. We both ordered mofongo, which is mashed green plantains with garlic and olive oil, very similar to mashed potatoes. It is then "stuffed" with chicken or shrimp. Unfortunately we didn't taken any pictures, but a couple days after arriving home, Freddy successfully made his own mofongo.
Also pictured are some of the new pots and pans we've received for wedding gifts and have been using daily.

Another port of call was St. Maarten/St. Martin. The spelling of the island's name depends on if you are on the Dutch side or the French side of the island, and they speak at least 5-6 languages: French, Dutch, Creole, Papiamentu, Spanish, and English. There is a famous beach here that is literally across the street from a landing strip of an airport. Freddy is somewhat fascinated by airplanes and has watched youtube videos of plane landing over this beach. So we ventured out and found a taxi to take us across the mountainous island to Maho beach.
It was AWESOME and Freddy was in heaven.

This sign reads: "jet blast of arriving and departing aircraft can cause severe physical harm resulting in extreme bodily harm and/or death"

Don't worry Mom, we're OK.

Another highlight of the cruise was the cruise ship itself, which had countless activities and wonderful food. They was plenty of variety for dinner each night, and we both ate quite a bit of Indian food. We also became friendly with our Indian waiter, who claims that the Indian food on the ship is just OK, and if we'd like to try real Indian food someday he can give us his mom's address in Mumbai.

Here is a picture of us on the Royal Promenade, which is like the town square or main street of the ship.


And now its back to normal life....thanks to everyone that celebrated with us!

Love,
Janet

Good food . . . and survival food

On Thanksgiving, two days before the wedding, we took the whole day to cook good food and be together as Janet worked through the table cards and we talked about the final details on what would become a legendary party. And we ate well, as the photo above suggests.

But you can't always manage "great" food. Sometimes when a mother is in the hospital, you fall back to survival food. The other day when I called Brian about Mom's trip to Swedish Covenant, he said, "I guess I'll lift weights for a while, take a shower, eat some leftover pasta with a fried egg on top, then go to the hospital." I was impressed: a pretty healthy approach to difficult times.

Tonight I didn't do so well. After a short nap this afternoon it was too late to cook any decent food before heading to the hospital, and we didn't have much in the fridge, anyway. What I managed? Rice with pepper-jack cheese on top and some leftover spinach, microwaved. To drink, in honor of Mom, a can of V8 juice. Not my best meal ever.

Apples + Butter + Sugar = APPLE STUDEL

As a child I remember my grandma making apple strudel before every holiday. She would make philo dough by hand, rolling it out on top of a linen tablecloth on our kitchen table. She would roll the dough out until it was the size of the table, then begin to fold it over, add a layer of butter, fold again, another layer of melted butter, until the dough was the size of a cake pan. My brother Patrick says it's called a laminated dough. Since we are beginners we bought frozen philo dough in a box. Perhaps some year we will graduate to making the dough ourselves, but this year I hoped to renew the tradition with my brother Patrick, a great chef and the family "food pornographer" along with our somewhat reluctant children. We spent a good hour peeling apples, then on to mixing in cinnamon, sugar and breadcrumbs. The really, really, hard part was layering philo dough, then brushing on a layer of butter, then adding a layer of philo dough, then brushing on a layer of melted butter, philo, butter, philo, butter, philo butter, the dough was tearing, too much butter was being used. We sent Brian off to the hardware store to get better quality paint brushes to layer on the butter. It really didn't seem to help much. I think now, the key is to keep the butter pretty warm, almost hot - that way it spreads quicker. In all it took us 3 hours to make 6 strudels, and some of you may have enjoyed one on Thanksgiving. I have some in the freezer, so on Christmas we can chow down!

Dancing Fools

What a wild wonderful wedding weekend. Too many highlights to share, so I'll limit myself to one -- the spirited dancers from the Barry and Byrne clans. 

Or click here:
http://flickr.com/photos/johnbyrnebarry/sets/72157610604340579/show/

And here are the rest of the weekend photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/johnbyrnebarry/sets/72157610577933111/

A storm blows through; food is eaten

It is beyond Pat's powers to blog about Janet's wedding, at least at this early juncture, so he is hoping someone else will jot a few lines to mark the occasion. But the next-day drop-in at 6743, that's an easy one.

With the college kids coming and going over the last few years, we coined a phrase about their visits: "they come in like a storm and blow out just as suddenly." Today's storm, with the whole family coming through for the post-wedding brunch, this one was more like a hurricane.

Mike and Lori had arrived first, maybe 11:30 a.m., prompting me to take some action on the bagels plan. I packed up Kevin's and my tuxedos and drove down to the tux place to drop them off, then stopped at Einstein's for two dozen bagels (26 actually), four tubs of cream cheese and two packets of lox. Got home, feeling great, and set them out on the counter as someone reported that the others were on the way. Good.

They came through the front door and for some reason headed right to the kitchen, surveyed the bagels and started putting them together and eating them, standing up. Brian's family; John, Nanette and Sean; Anne and Dave; Mom; Tom and Paula and Jeremy Prendergast; oh, and Carolyn and Brett appeared from the basement and Kevin and Li-Yi from upstairs, plus Mike and Lori and Pam and me. WOW!

"Do you have coffee?" asks Nanette, the empty pot in her hand. "Tea?" Sheila asks. Yes. Yes. Let's make that happen. And let's get those big trays of Maggiano's food out of the fridge because this crowd looks hungry, so we put those on the stove and Adam made up the first plate, popped it in the microwave and attracted more eaters as the smells of shells and asparagus filled the rooms. After it was realized that we had little to drink in the house, Carolyn and Brett went over to 7-11 to pick up root beer and juice.

And so it went. I was happy to take an appreciative audience (Tom Prendergast and Anne) on a tour of the new and old woodwork while others ate and talked and discovered that some of the wedding cake was also in the fridge and ate some of that too, with Erin "enabling" Granny by bringing her a slice of cake with plenty of frosting and then getting her a second plate of frosting without any cake at all!

Then the storm escalated as the Prendergasts headed for Cleveland; John and Nanette went for the train to visit the Art Institute; Kevin, Li-yi, Mike and Lori headed for Detroit; Carolyn and Brett packed up the hedgehog and headed to Urbana; Brian's family rushed out to deliver Erin to the Megabus back to Bloomington; and Anne and Dave took Mom back to Alden. There were hugs and more hugs, exclamations of congratulations about the fine wedding (and it was fine), bursts of fresh wind as people loitered near the door, telling one more story.

And then it was over. By three o'clock everyone was gone, along with 21 bagels, three pots of coffee and numerous plates of food. The biggest, fastest-moving storm I can remember, and on a very big weekend. And now it is quiet and we are feeling very happy and that is very sweet.

Pre-wedding Thanksgiving feast - preparations

In the spirit of Live-Blogging, this post is in reverse chronological order. That means that those of you following this live, can just read the top most of the page. However for the full story, start at the bottom most bold title and move upwards.

4:13 PM The bread is out of the oven! Stay tuned as the sweet potatoes, which have just been placed in the oven, should be coming out soon.

3:46 PM Freddy has just taken the stage and sprayed the bread. This creates a well crusted bread, with a delicate inside.

Meanwhile Li-yi has finished the mushroom prep, while Kevin reserved a spot in the oven-queue just before the queue was declared feature-frozen.












It's been a lovely morning at the Barry house on Newgard as we intersperse food preparation with final details for the wedding. Last night, Janet and Freddy finished up the jigsaw-puzzle of who sits where and Janet typed the names for placecards in an elegant wedding-like script. This morning we printed out the cards and now Janet and Carolyn "maid of honor" and Pam are sorting into alphabetical piles. They seem to be enjoying themselves and it is good practice for us all as the names from the Lepore side become more and more familiar: Tolomeo, Chiappetti, Zbiegien and Bahr. And Lepore, of course, plenty of them, mostly named Anthony.

Meanwhile Kevin and Li-yi are working out some sort of algorithm for recognizing objects while doing robotic mapping, and Pam and I have been doing the most important thing: cooking.

So far the kitchen has produced Pat's "wellness" soup chock full of vegetables, white beans, pasta rings and hot peppers, of course. We've been eating that for lunch. For dinner, Pam has roasted the butternut squash for the spring rolls, chopped the pumpkin seeds and cilantro, sliced the green onions and prepared the special sauce.

And Freddy? He's mixed and kneaded the dough for the Cuban bread, or is it French bread? It's in a big bowl right now rising, and when Freddy peeked under the cloth earlier he seemed satisfied.

Kevin and Li-yi are now starting on "some kind of treat" made out of rice flour, plus stuffed mushrooms. I may make some long beans in red sauce if the mood strikes me.

We're not going to starve, that's for sure. Not today, not tomorrow, not on the wedding day. We'll be eating very nicely I'd say.

More later.

Al k'PWN3D

Well Grace, I will admit that I have been feeling pretty pwned for the past few days, due to your post. Especially the leeks. Though I might not be interested in the chicken sitting underneath them, I do highly respect the food-based insulator to protect the leeks, as well as the Let-'em-Burn attitude.

But Grace, I can't help but notice, that your examples lack Chocolate Pie. That's right, you are looking at a photo of a Gram Cracker Crusted, Chocolate-Peanutbutter pie. It required lots of blender work, and the crust stuck to the dish a bit too much, but the taste was excellent.

Unfortunately, Chocolate Pie doesn't make a complete meal. For that you might need a few extras, like sushi.

The most important part of sushi is the rice. For that we use 2 cups of sushi-grade rice, cooked normally, except for a small amount of seaweed mixed in for flavor. Then a rice vinegar concoction is made by mixing 4 tablespoons of rice vinegar with 3 tablespoons of sugar and 2 teaspoons of salt. Next is the tricky part, heating the rice vinegar mixture to dissolve the solids, without getting any of the horrible fumes up your nose. Good luck. The good news is that after dissolved, you simply mix the vinegar with the rice and are ready to make sushi.

Spreading the rice onto seaweed can be a bit tricky, you MUST use cold-damp-hands, and you want an even coat, going all the way to the edges, but you don't want it so dense that the roll is too large. Don't be afraid of leaving some seaweed visible beneath the rice. Also be careful when placing ingredients. Too much can be overwhelming. But don't be afraid of experimenting, just because you can't order a Banana-Roll at Nami on Nine Mile, doesn't mean it won't be delicious. A time saving option is to get some tofu-skin pouches. They're beautiful and tasty, but variety is still best.If you're going the seaweed route, a very sharp knife is needed to cut the sushi rolls without smushing them.
Once cut, just present on a nice plate and combine with some soy sauce and wasabi. Delicious.

Well Grace, I believe you've been counter-pwned. What'll it be? A quick retaliation before Thanksgiving, or are you saving your firepower for the Thanksgiving Day Blog Posting Barn-Burner?

FOOD PWNAGE

Alright Tesla cat, you ask for food? I will give you food! The following pictures are dating from quite a while back. we amassed food pictures from, ah, lets say August? They are mostly unrelated and there are a whole lot of them, so brace yourself for about a page of mind-blasting food colour. Ah. BUT OF COURSE. the evil computer monster (he eats pictures) is being ornery today and refuses to give me the pictures I want. So I suppose you'll have to make do with this:

Hmm. what looks like a huge, delicious omelet. ah, yes. a frittata, perhaps? we will never know. but what we do know was that this was made with blood red tomatoes, dripping in juice, snappy red bell peppers, filled with the tang and sweetness on the level of a albatross, topped with crumbly feta cheese fresh out the cow. (not). beat that for good writing.

And here is the Barry table on the grill. That's fresh eggplant and chicken marinated in honey and soy sauce marinade. For those who look past the flesh of animals with a hankering for fruits of veggies, you'll have to do with the eggplant.

Ah, the leeks, the leeks. these leeks are positioned conveniently an top of the chicken as to not burn them, but I say, let them be burned!! Adds texture.



and the completed masterpiece. grilled chicken, leeks and onions,eggplants, a hot corn salad...of some sort... mango's and pineapple, and last but definitely not least, grilled bread brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt from the black magma rocks of Hawaii.

as said in the title:

FOOD PWNAGE


hahahah.

-Grace

It's ON Grace, ON like Donkey-Kong!

Well Grace, if you just want some stupid food, I can tell you about stupid food. See, though it might get boring once in a while, us cats are simple creatures. We wake up, make a little noise, our pet human gets up and fetches us some delicious food, it might be the same food day after day, but it's always delicious and doesn't require any work on my part. But humans, those are funny creatures. Instead of just eating some ready-made cat food, they have to talk about what to make, take trips to the store to get ingredients, make a big mess, and then eat something funny. My humans, who normally try to make Chinese dishes have been on an American food kick lately. Now that is some stupid food. Let's start with Pizza, specifically the pizza that Kevin and Li-yi made while they could've been napping like me.

Baby corn and avocado, with tomato sauce and Trader Joe's basil pizza dough? As if that weren't weird enough, they also make a second pizza with asparagus, mushrooms of every kind, and funny colored peppers. If I were to make a pizza, it'd have cat grass dough, no tomato sauce, and extra cat kibbles on top. Forget the vegetables.
But no american food is complete without some pie. Now i'm not talking about catnip pie or something delicious, i'm talking about pumpkin pie. Pumpkins are supposed to sit outside and look silly, not be eaten. But humans, they just don't understand these things, so they cut up a pumpkin and cooked it and blended it and cooked it again and eventually came up with one of these. I took a sniff of it, then lost interest and took a nap. By the time I woke up they'd eaten it all. Humans...

But now if you want really weird food, you have to skip their American nights and check out their Chinese nights. One night they're making something called "Goo-da", which sounds pretty good to me. That is until I saw them making it. Why would you name a dish after the word "Good" if it's got zucchini in it? Beats me. But they put some zucchini in some kind of dough, and put the whole thing into a soup. Towards the end of the meal they still had like 7 "good" balls left and Kevin said he'd eat 5 of them. That perked my interested as if it's really that good maybe I should try some (I'd already eaten all my food anyway). But Kevin's eyes are bigger than his stomach and he only ate one of the "good" balls before giving up.


Then another night, Li-yi takes a bunch of mushrooms and chops their tails off (Ouch!). She then prepares some kind of tofu-pepper mix and stuffs it back into the mushroom. I have to admit, the final result was pretty beautiful, but it still doesn't hold a candle to a fresh bowl of Science Diet Light for Cats (I prefer the flavor of Light, it's not because I'm on a diet).


Well that's about all the stupid food I can think of at the moment. What have you been eating lately Grace? I highly recommend the Science Diet Light for Cats if you are looking for something new.

Everyone's Favorite Cat,
-Tesla

3 MONTHS

ITS BEEN 3 MONTHS POST SOME FOOD!

HOWS THAT FOR DELICIOUS?

POST SOME STUPID FOOD!

MADE EXCLUSIVLEY BY GRACE

Tesla's Lima Beans.

As usual, things are busy in Detroit. Though technically between semesters, and everyone's self-regulated lab hours have relaxed a bit, there is plenty of robotic work to be done. Additionally I'm in the process of finding a new apartment before my lease expires, and my mother just informed me that my health insurance ceases after tomorrow. But the Barry cure-all of food still seems to apply. Liyi stopped at the grocery on her way to my apartment today and brought some delicious goodies, though tempted by the 包子 (baozi) filled with vegetables (rather than custard) we decided to make use of the produce. It started with a large side of Chinese style lima beans, that we made some mistakes on. Tesla turned up his nose and opted for cat chow instead. Liyi and I salvaged the lima beans with a vegetable stir fry containing zucchini, bamboo shoots, snow peas, tofu, onion, and noodles. We then mixed in a few of the lima beans.

While us Humans rested after eating a big meal, Tesla was full of energy and decided to go for a bike ride. Don't worry, he always wears his helmet.

Two Short Summer Vacations

Warm summer nights. Swimming. Not logging on.

I took two wonderful, albeit short vacations -- to Washington, D.C., to visit Sean (and my friend Mark), and to Los Angeles, to meet up with Nanette, who was working down there -- and now I'm back to the fog and sitting inside all day in front of a computer monitor. But they were great while they lasted.

Here are several photos of each trip. First is Sean in front of Great Falls on the Potomac, just north of D.C., then there are a couple of shots of us "swimming" and wading in the two-foot deep White Oak Canyon Creek in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. And then there's Sean in front of the DNC, a few blocks from the Capitol.

Then there's Nanette and me with from Runyon Canyon, up in the Hollywood Hills, walking distance from where we were staying with her friend David. The last shot is downtown L.A. from this canyon.

There are plenty more photos on Flickr -- DC | LA